Black Dust
by Time Traveler 7
Summary: Ten years before the events of RWBY there was a team called PSTL. The members of the team are remembered by their classmates because of the peculiarity of their abilities and the events which transpired around them. A few characters from RWBY are or will be mentioned in future chapters, most of them teachers. Review as you see fit.
1. Chapter 1

Grimm Possibilities

Lune

 _Eyes, grey-blue, unseeing with a reflection of a clearing in them. Red eyes of grimm reflected in them. Fear in the eyes-greyblue-unseeing._

 _Water. Oceans. Fear. Serpentine and dark beneath the sea. Coming for you. Coming for me…_

Lune kicked her legs at the Ouros Grimm, and was relieved to discover that it was not there. She found herself pinching her right arm tight enough to draw blood. She smiled, recognizing her technique in relocating herself was working, just as he said it would.

Now, about that Eyes-Greyblue-Unseeing. Sometimes Lune would sit on park benches and cast lives like lots. She would ask who these people were, what were their lives like and who did they think they were? And she would see people grow up, grow old and die all in a span of seconds, and she never saw the same life twice. And she discovered she was no closer to knowing that person than before.

Lune closed her eyes and entrusted the present.

The breathed deep and caught the first whiff of forest. She could hear the air whistle by her. She was free falling without a parachute into a forest full of grimm. Was this what it was like to be a huntress?

Lune guessed she should head for a deep body of water. Where was the nearest one? She looked but could not see one, but that did not mean one wasn't there. Lune cast her lots for a body of water. She found nothing. That still didn't mean there was nothing there. But she was still blind to it and her chance to land properly was quickly coming to an abrupt, painful dead end.

Controlled stop in the trees, but that wouldn't be pretty. Of course she could protect herself with her aura but if she needed to fight a grimm her aura was her best line of defense.

It was time, the trees were two seconds away.

She maintained her spread eagle and aimed for a high tree. She let her aura out _fth, fth, swsh, fth, swsh swahsh sth_. _Ouch_. _QUURRKK. Ooof_. A great landing.

She was ten feet up in the lower branches of a very large maple tree.

The woman dropped from the branches, only a few scrapes and bruises present on her extremities.

She stood and tried to sigh but did not because she thought for a moment she was underwater. And then the clarity of thought came to her, the sky was blue, the leaves were green and there was nothing to indicate she is in the briny depths.

 _Eyes, greyblue, unseeing._ He was in the forest, but afraid of the grimm in the sea. Afraid already of sea-grimm? That indicated she had just seen the past…. his past.

 _Where might he be?_ She thought. The woman only got the image of the eyes and the clearing, sometimes the lighting changed, sometimes the time of year changed, but the location changed little. That still didn't tell her where the eyes were. So Lune ventured forward into the east. The air in the east felt like it clung to her clothes and wet her skin.

Tene

Tene Breux thought to himself, _Well fuck._ _Whose idea was this? Who thought:_ _HEY! You know what a good first mission would be?! CATAPULT PEOPLE INTO A FOREST FULL OF GRIMM! We come up with their own landing strategy. We have to figure out where the damn artifacts are at. And our team mates are the people we first make eye contact with. How am I supposed to do that?_

There was a simple reason behind this simple thought: He was blind. The Blind Man was also falling from the sky into a forest he'd never seen before. Ozpin explained to the man it was anywhere between fifteen and twenty seconds into his q-field from the onset. This meant he'd have another second and a half to react before the blind man started hitting trees.

He felt the trees then; heard the rustling of the leaves in the wind. The blind man smelled the summer forest. He felt the sun on his skin. Only thing Tene couldn't do was see. Such a shame. He was certain it was a beautiful day. He bet there were great big puffy clouds and any normal person would be finding pictures in the sky.

Naming constellations is like cloud watching.

He shut the non-sequitor thought from his head.

First thing the blind man did: slowed himself down. He accelerated away from the ground, but not so fast as to move himself upwards, only slow himself. He fell in a controlled path through the trees and landed with a roll. Pulled the seeing-eye cane from his back and began to chart his way through the forest. If any grimm came they'd be sorry. The blind man was prepared.

 _Sea grimm._ He thought and shivered. _Bad memories. Get rid of them._

Pan

Pan's life was constantly narrated by a sarcastic observer named Pan. In essence, the author of the story prefers to defer to Pan to narrate his own perspective from time to time. I, the author, will mark such points as italized because, it is, after all Pan's own thoughts.

 _It is a fact that a human on Remnant will fall from the sky on an average of 100 mph. It is another fact that this is caused by air resistance. It is a fact that I can increase air resistance quite easily. I can float on a cushion of air. I can fuck on a couch in the sky._

 _I can do as I please. Who is going to stop me?_ Pan thought. _Do I feel a brief smile light my face? Indeed I do. If only mother could see it. She loved my smile. Said it would brighten her day. And sometimes it literally would brighten her day._

 _Controlled descent is a little like flying, except I am a brick gliding through sky. I feel like I am quoting something, from a book definitely. But what book? Ahh, I cannot remember. It will bother me for the rest of the day._

 _Where to land? I cannot possibly fly forever. I think that would make me a cheat. Huh. No puffy clouds. It is a perfectly clear day, there is not a cloud in the sky. I like it this way. But I know it will fill with clouds tonight._

 _How about that lake there? Yes. I can feel the heat from it already. I think I will land in it and turn the whole thing to ice for effect._

 _Accelerating…building up air around me like a shell…the plume of water that will come up with look cool. No wait. That is a horrid idea. I will get hypothermia if I freeze it for effect._

 _SPLOOOSH!_

 _Swimming upwards, up and up and up. BREATHING! Gasping for much needed air. I can make it rain without dampening the day._

 _Can I make hail shaped like dollar bills?_

Pan swam to shore. When he came close his legs sank knee deep into silt, his mouth and nose plunged beneath the waterline and he nearly panicked, but regained his cool and trudged onwards, moving his arms and kicking his legs out of the mud, he regained control over his limbs and oriented himself horizontally and floated to shore where he climbed through the mud and the grass and the marshy smelling water onto shore where he breathed the air much like the first fish who climbed out of the ocean. He smiled and decided he would try to make it rain dollar bills. He stood erect, knelt on shore and shoved his hands into the water, cooling the water to freezing temperature and creating several, paper-thin sheets of ice which he pulled out of the water and began to carve with his semblance.

He looked up from his work and saw a woman looking at him. He waved back at her and threw a dollar bill into the water. _Make it rain._

Saun

"Little mockingbird, come here this instant." Saun sang under my breath. "Be there soon, artifacts. What are you going to be? Where are you going to be? How long has this exercise lasted in the past? It must have gone on for an impressive amount of time." she laced each syllable with sub-sonic frequencies which slowed her descent somewhat. _Better to hit tree branches at 30mph than 100 mph._

 _The day is nice. Warmer than the mountains. I wonder if Lune is okay. I hope she is. I hope we're partners. What a strange girl she is. She knows more than she ever lets on. What goes on in that head of her's? I wonder how she'll land._

 _Fsh, swsh, QQRK_ , _swh swhs shwhshshs, QKRRRKKAAK_.

"OOOFF!" She fell out of her tree and onto the ground.

The Oumanette looked around. She was on the shore of a little lake. The blue sky was reflected on its surface. The trees bordered the lake and the sky.

And then a streak of brown struck the water's surface. A great plume of water jutted out into the sky. Waves undulated across the surface of little lake. Saun let out a scream.

A boy appeared at the other end of the lake. He swam to shore and began playing in the water. She cocked her head and stared at him. As if he recognized her staring he looked over in her direction. He waved. She waved back. He threw something in the water and started his way over to her.

Lune

"Blind man, in the Forest Grimm," Lune muttered. There was one thing her cast told her: _Danger ahead._ Whatever forces allowed her precognition they told the oracle as much as she told the heroes and villains.

Whatever the case, there was something strange about the air here. Something made the leaves aquamarine and out of the corner of her eye she thought she saw movement. _It's not the air. It's me._ She found herself pinching her skin again. Reality was regained.

Tap, clack, tap, clack, tap, clack, tap, tap, tap, tap. Silent steps in the Forest Grimm. The tapping of a blind man's walker.

 _It's nothing._ She pinched herself harder. Tap. Clack. Tap. Clack.

Lune looked to her left and there was the clearing, and there was the blind man. He had hair which seemed to fit neither blonde nor dirty blonde nor brown, and there was some kind of distant hint of red within it. He wore a red scarf, a black coat and camouflage pants. In his hand was a thick black, striped cane which seemed a little longer and too thick to be a normal cane for a blind man. He stopped walking. He stared ahead, not at her but to the other side of the clearing where stood a stand of trees and bushes.

There were eyes in the bush. Red eyes of Grimm. The Grimm of the vision. But what kind of Grimm?

One flash told the Augur it was an Ursa, another a lupis, and another something else.

 _Water, water, everywhere._

Lune stepped forward and let her hammer rest on the ground. "Need not face it alone, Gloomy."

"I know," he never looked at her. But the Augur thought she saw his face muscles flex. He swung his cane in an arc in front of him. The handle went through a straightening motion, the stripe untwisted and flattened, a second blade fell into his other hand, the blade which had been the black stripe. He turned to her and looked the woman in the eye with his unseeing eyes. The same blue-grey eyes of her vision. The Grimm exploded from its cover. There were two ursii. "No one need face the void alone when there are others close at hand." With that lifted his left hand and the blade flew out of his hand, he never looked where he aimed, apparently he didn't need to because the blade struck the ursa in one red eye and its body went limp. Tene stumbled forward then, he lost his composure and his pale skin seemed to turn paler.

For a second, just a second, _there were bubbles emerging from his mouth, air escaping his lungs._

Lune didn't know what happened to him. She just knew he was unguarded. That just sending a blade flying was weakening to him.

She ran forward and leaped into the _water_. _The water was slowing down her movements. She felt the pressure of it on her chest, in her ears. She could feel the upward motion, forcing her to the surface. Her hammer rising high. Now falling. Falling. This isn't water._ The second ursa roared. Lune cast forward and saw it might raise a paw at her. She prepared her hammer to strike at the paw. The paw began to rise, _but as if it was rising in water._ In her next cast she caught a glimpse of silver as a blade flew back in someone's hand. The woman knew help would come soon after she broke the paw. She completed that thought and her hammer contacted the paw. The woman's foot suddenly oriented forward so her sole faced the face of the ursa. She stepped on the ursa's face, took a second leap off its head and oriented so her body faced the back of the ursa. It looked very annoyed.

 _The grass. It is like long bands of kelp waving in a current. The bushes are becoming coral and the leaves are becoming fish. There are stingrays wandering the bottom. An eel slithered around her head, but she ignored it._

And then the was distracted by a blind man swinging a singular blade in hand, one side light, one side dark. It struck the ursa right up underside of the neck and the bottom jaw. Blood spurted from the wound. Blood seemed to spurt from the blade. _The blood mingled with the water…but wait, it didn't. It flew into the air._ The Augur landed and skidded through the grass and began to run towards the beast. _Each step faster than the one before, but still not fast enough to escape the water. But there is no water._ She thought.

But a strange thing happened. The ursa took a swipe at the blind man with its uninjured paw and somehow the man was able to stop its paw from giving him serious damage. He simply blocked it with his arm and followed the opening with a swipe of his blade at its barreled chest. He literally just stood in the same spot, paw aiming for his head, lifted his left hand and stopped the paw dead and then pushed it back and swiped at the opening.

Awe aside, Lune struck at the back of the ursa's head hoping to break its neck. She was successful. The body fell limp and it roared in fear and pain. It fell to the ground and roared the whole while.

It still lived.

 _In my head. The ursa is transforming into a snake. A giant snake. Face widening. Legs cannot seem to stay outside the body. Its tail elongates, but when I look at it I know its and ursa, but when I don't think about it becomes the snake._

But then the man lopped off its head. With a cane, no less.

 _Battle's over._ Lune moved her hand across to her other arm and dug a long scratch on her forearm.

The man extended his hand in Lune's general vicinity. "Hello, my name is Tene," he pronounced it like Tehneh but not as breathy, "Tene Breuse. You are?"

"Uhh," the woman shook his hand and replied, "Lune, Lune isi Selene."

He cocked his head, but his eyes did not for to her scratch. "Good to meet you Lune isi Selene. Shall we find the artifacts now?"

"Of course!" Selene said.

"Great! Which way to the nearest forest?"

Saun and Pan

Pan and Saun had talked. They had talked about nothing, really. Pan conjured a gust of wind and they both were dry. Pan didn't seem to mind frizzy hair, but she did. She kept trying to keep her hair down. At first Pan looked at her as if she were strange, but then decided she wasn't. That was all Saun isi Selene got from him.

They walked a deer trail into the forest.

"Sooo…um. Where did you go to combat school?"

"I didn't go to combat school. I was trained by a huntsman who protects my village." Pan replied.

What are you supposed to say to that? Saun's sister was better at talking. It was no wonder she was Vice President of the Local Vale Branch of the Schnee Dust Company. She got father's manipulative, unparalleled social skills, Saun got mother's brusque, awkward manner. Even Lune the weird had better skills than Saun. "Oh. My cousin, Lune, and I went to Gallant, a small combat school in Vale." Silence.

Pan didn't reciprocate. He seemed to be studying something about her. The way he looked at her was not the way men often looked at her, but instead he was assessing her like a weapon to be used in the future. A pawn to be played.

Saun sighed.

Tene and Lune

Tene thought the joke about "the nearest forest" would make her laugh. She gave a polite, nervous laugh and then pointed towards the forest. He laughed politely.

 _To be polite is to hide behind a farce. To be polite is to lie about who you are. You cannot know someone, truly, when they are polite. How very sophisticated. And then there is the fact that she seemed out of it half the time. Her attention always wandering to places where nothing was happening. And whenever that happened she scratches herself, but does not hesitate to do so. Eager to feel the pain._

Maybe he should have told her he was blind. "I'm blind."

"I know." Lune replied.

"But I can see."

"So I see." _I never expected the visions to come by so fast._

"Describe the day to me. I can 'feel' the trees and the leaves and the heat of the sun on my skin. But I can't see the color. Describe the day to me, please. Could you do that Lune?" Playing the poor blind man sometimes broke the ice a little.

 _What if I say something wrong?_ "The sky is blue. There is not a cloud in the sky. The sun is at noon and the shadows of the trees are short. There aren't very many sunbeams. The leaves," she lifted a hand to feel the bark of a sycamore, _they look blue again,_ "are very green, varying colors of green." _Of blue._ "If it were closer to sunset the forest would be lit up golden, with shafts of light shining down upon the wood, through maple and sycamore, oak and evergreen alike." _And the kelp would cast faintly seen shadows over top the shadows of the waves above our heads._ "The shadows would be long and a thin cloud would mark the sky. You can see the mountains from here, their slopes grey, craggy, dangerous, the tops white in the light of day. Each is clear and distinct, from craggy mountain top, to white mountain top, to bluest sky." _There are fish behind trees and coral growing from root edifices. In the distance I'm not sure if those are mountains or endless ocean._

He imagined the scene. Tene applied a world of color to what he saw through his semblance, but could not secure it in his imagination. It was as if the vision was lost from him, forever. He shook his head.

And then he felt her pinch herself, pinch herself hard enough to bleed, and blood did emerge from the wound. Tene wondered how to bring it up. He could tell by her being that she was under a lot of stress. _Maybe she isn't a warrior_. But it seemed more like she was trying to control herself. "What's wrong?"

Simultaneously, Lune asked, "What's wrong?"

Tene spoke first, "I can't see it. I can't see the scene you described."

"Maybe I didn't use the right words," Lune tried to explain. _Did I say the right words? Did I say something wrong?_ "The word is a powerful thing, it can communicate truth, it can transfer ideas, real and unreal. You caught me a little off guard, but maybe I can describe it better for you with a little bit of time." She sucked on her lower lip in thought. "How do you see?"

The blind man smiled, what did he see? Could words describe it? Yes, words of a different kind, though. In order for it to be understood she needed to experience what he 'felt' of the world. Only then would language be appropriate. The world is a lonely place when there is only one. Language was built for two. "Language is built for two," the blind man repeated. "It must first be experienced. Because what I see is not like sight, it is not like sound or taste, smell or touch. It has more in common with knowing the placement of my arms in space than it does anything else. Like if I just reach out," he extended his hand to the trunk of a tree and entangled himself with as much of it as he could, "I could turn reality itself into an arm and a leg." Tene moved the molecules aside, allowing his hand to slide through the bark. He disentangled himself from part of the tree and he touched the skin of the tree, he entangled himself with the rings and moved the molecules further apart. Sweat congealed on his forehead. He pushed himself through the trunk of the tree and right out the other side. The blind man was wet with sap and gasping for air. He immediately disentangled himself from the tree. His whole body shook. The world about him seemed to take on a different cast.

Lune was immediately at his side. He pushed her away. "I'm fine," Tene stated brusquely.

He felt a cliff face nearby, part of the rock curved inwards into a circular hole.

"Now what is wrong with your arm?"

Pan and Saun

" _Hitchhiker's Guide_ to something," _I was beginning to remember the name of the book. The one with the flying the bricks. A rough quote of what the brick thing was was,_ _They flew through the sky exactly as bricks don't._

"Huh?" Saun inquired. "Did you say something?" _weirdo._ _I finished her sentence for her in my head. That is exactly what I was to her._

"Just a book," I replied. _CRACK. WHOOSH._ They turned about. Something dark had run through the bushes behind them.

Saun turned and spread her hand.

There was a wave in the air which my eye barely perceived. It expanded as it travelled through the air. By the time it reached the bush it was a little bigger than the bush, and when it reached the bush the branches of the bush momentarily rustled, then very quickly the leaves were torn from their branches and pulled inwards into the heart of the bush, this implosion of leafage was followed by the total implosion of the branches themselves and then a small explosion of bush, which left only a hole in the ground and a scatter of twigs and leaves flying high.

There was another Pan turned, his arm spread out and he spun around, electricity congealed around his fingertips with each cubic centimeter of air his arm passed through. He spun around once, and then as his arm neared the origin of the sound, his arm feeling numb, a metallic taste flooding his mouth, he released the electricity in a blue bolt. A grimm cub flew backwards and struck a tree, blood spattered up the trunk.

 _Like paint on a wall._ He thought.

And then, the mama appeared. Fourteen feet tall, coat black as midnight, white spikes running down her spine, teeth glistening in the sunlight, four red eyes boring into Pan's soul. Mama roared. She was a hundred yards away. She had been extremely quiet the whole time.

 _Time to take control, I pull out my sickle pistol beauties_ , "What was that thing you did!?"

Mama started galloping towards them.

"It was sound! I imploded a bush with sound you can't hear!" Saun replied.

 _Sound. Words. Speech. Language. Communication. Heart. No. Language. Communication. Ears. Inner ears. Grimm have ears. Fifty meters away._ "Okay, are you more accurate than exploding bushes?"

"Yes!" Saun replied.

 _Twenty-five_.

"Then explode into mama's ears! Rip them to shreds! Destroy the inner ear and you destroy its ability to move through space effectively!" he insisted.

 _Five_.

"NOW!"

Saun fired at the thing's head. There was that nearly uncatchable disturbance in the air, not unlike a heat wave over asphalt, or a mirage in the desert. Mama was three meters away. Saun's attack surrounded the head of the beast and its legs went out from underneath it, its body cratered into the ground and it slid past where Pan and Saun were and struck a tree, the trunk cracked and it began to fall over. The upper branches of the felled tree were caught in the upper branches of nearby trees and were sustained.

Mama roared in obvious pain. It pawed at the air, red eyes darting to and fro, spikes shivering, tail tucked between its legs. Pan's heart broke.

And then Saun produced a loud _boom_ and the ursa cowered from the noise. After eliciting a sufficiently pellucid fear response, she set another blast and with one last roar fading into the forest, echoing off mountains and ridges to their ears, and into the ears of the dead grimm.

"It fell on dead ears," Pan spoke the irony. "What did you do?" He asked monotonously.

Saun stepped forward, a smile crept onto her face. "I exploded its heart." Black waves began to emerge from the grimm corpse. "It will be gone very soon. Let's go."

Tene and Lune

Lune had ignored Tene's inquiry into her well-being. She understood full well that this was not in her best interest, but was currently overcome with irrationality, and besides, she did not like the dark turn Tene's personality had taken.

It seemed that, much like herself, Tene was unstable as well. Ever since the inquiry she noticed the bags under his eyes were deepening, his skin was turning paler. He stumbled a few times and he seemed more reliant on his cane than what she had seen. She wondered just what he was _sensing_. Before it seemed he had no trouble but now it was different. His eyes were dull and glassy, like a doll's. Each step was taken with hesitantly and lackadaisically, a strange contrast. In a way it was not _her_ health he should have been worried about, but _his_.

Tene stumbled over a rock but regained his footing quickly. Lune frowned.

She extended her hand to the walls and felt them. When Lune touched the walls of the cave, she felt the people who drew the pictures upon them. The depth of their lives were real, their emotions tingled through my body, making her heart leap, her stomach sink, her chest to yearn and her legs to nearly shake. Laughter, screaming, smiles, frowns. The Augur's hand passed over an image of a grimm and there was…void. The same emotions shook her being, yearning and revulsion alike, but there was no grounding for them. It was soulless.

 _A singular being. Cassandra is calling._

An image of a man crept into her mind's eye. White hair. Blue eyes. Rich clothes. Rapier at his side. Upon his head was a helmet of silver. Upon his breast was a plate of steal laced with ice. His being spoke _cold_ to her, but his eyes spoke _warmth_. His smile was indifferent, his lips thin and white. He was not old or weak, he young and vital. On his breast was a snowflake. Dust was woven into his clothes. A glyph hung over his head. A glyph of summoning, as if he had been summoned into her head.

The man was gone within a few seconds. Lune could only catch a glimpse of him, not much more. _Who was he? Why was he important?_ She had stopped walking over the grimm.

Tene had kept walking. "Tene!"

In the darkness, his voice called, "What?" He sighed deeply, his outline appeared from the shadows as if the sigh had carried him in.

"It's dark. I have the light," Lune smiled and held up the flaming stick they had dipped in sap and lit fire with Tene's ability.

"So what? I can see perfectly fine." There was a strong vein of derision in his words.

Pained worry knitted itself across Lune's face. She ran up to him and grabbed his hand.

"Let go of me!"

"Hey! Calm down. Feel the walls."

"I don't need to," he spoke pejoratively.

"Entangle with the walls, feel the paintings on their surface. And you can become a part of them in doing so. They're old." She added as if that would change his decision. She pulled him along and placed his hand on the wall.

He entangled with the wall. "It's a wall. With pictures. Hooray. Ancient people were so smart they had _eyes_."

"Well, it's just interesting…"

"I don't care, yah _lune_. They're _pictures_. And I don't _have eyes_. What use are _they_ to _me_." He turned harshly and walked into the darkness. And then he turned again to her and raised his arms above his head, "What is the use of _anything?_ " He turned back around and seemed to disappear into darkness.

"What?" Lune called. "Wait! There could be grimm ahead." The Augur lied. Lune knew that the artifacts were most likely in a large chamber ahead. There might be a waterfall. There might be a vein of fire dust. There might be both, the fire dust behind the falls giving the room a red, eerie feeling as the light swam over the crevices, your skin, the walls creeping, the images shifting eternally. She could see the paintings growing more disorganized. This was the heart of the darkness. The chaos of the soul of the ancient inhabitants of Vale, of humanity, of Remnant. The Augur pinched the images away. _Someday I'll need more than a pinch and a scratch._

"I kill grimm." Tene reminded her.

Lune's back shivered, there was a negative attitude to his words. He was growing steadily worse.

 _Why?_

The image of the of the chaos room ahead. But there wasn't as much red light.

"What is wrong with you? You're really down now." She called out.

Tene called back, "I'm fine. Stop bitching about me."

"I'm not! I'm just concerned!" She ran ahead to keep up with him. The woman was by his side within a few seconds.

"There is no need to be. I'm fine!" Tene stopped walking. He held out his hand to stop her.

Lune gasped.

Out of the darkness dozens of eyes.

When she cast why had she not seen this?

"Did you expect this?" Tene asked.

"No!"

"Goddamn augury!" He stumbled forward, away from her, and his cane became the dual swords.

 _I wonder if they have names…_ Lune wondered. Two names entered her head, _Augur's Bone_ and _Crepuscule_. _White as her bones, as dripping with blood as hers was. As dark as dark twilight, but not quite night. It is the last real memory of a world of light. The last thing to survive the setting sun._

Lune pinched herself. "But there is a room ahead!" Lune cried. "A large one with a waterfall!" The first grimm left the shadows and made for Tene and Lune.

Tene huffed and sank one of his swords, _Crepuscule_ , hilt deep into the chest of a canis. "Wonderful."

Saun and Pan

 _She was standing over the body. Smiling. She exploded its heart. Why didn't she do that in the first place?_ "Why didn't you explode its heart in the first place?"

Saun smiled, "I did not think of it." She pushed a strand of hair out of her face and hung it on her ear.

"Why did you torture it before killing it? I saw what you _did_. You elicited a fear response with a sonic blast. It clearly heard the sonic blast and cowered in fear from its source. _You_. Normal people—" the words caught in his throat. _None of us are really normal._

"After all that the grimm have done to mankind, after the choice they make every time they attack a human, do you really think they should not be punished for their actions?" Saun demanded.

Pan opened his mouth, but shut it quickly. He decided it did not matter. If she turned her sadistic tendencies against people he would do anything to stop her then. _Besides they_ are _Grimm. Don't be so Grimm, turn that frown_ up _side down!_

Saun smiled again. She had believed Pan was smarter than she first thought. But that was the best argument she could give off the cuff. Unless if Pan didn't buy it, but found arguing over it useless, or tedious, perhaps.

Echoing across cliff faces, the sounds of a battle within the cliffs themselves was evident to Saun and a few others close by.

"There are caves in the cliffs," Saun reported. "There is a battle going on inside them."

"Then let's go! Which way?"

"The cliffs are a few hundred feet that way!" She pointed east, the tops of the cliffs were not yet visible through the canopy.

They ran through the forest in the direction of the cliffs. _You are running. Running. Running. Palm strikes face! 'YOU HIT A TREE!'_ Thought Pan.

Lune and Tene

 _White hair. Blue eyes. Rich clothes. Confident stride. He is in an office overlooking an icy pine forest. A man in his fifties looks to be at a desk, emotionlessly analyzing the man's speech, not bored, but invested in what he has to say. The man has the same white hair, the same blue eyes. But the face is different. His body spoke of_ warmth _but his eyes of_ aged cold, _as of_ worn steel.

 _"What is the extent of…"_ the snarls of the grimm _"…can we summon the…"_ ravenous eyes, hammer to the butcher's x of the beast, _"…the people in the military! The studies they…"_ hammer smash to the side of the head, grimm biting her arm, _"…aura of others, we only need…"_ Tene's sword had chopped off the head of the canis, her arm was bleeding, shaking, her hammer fell from her grasp, _"…you, grandmother, Winter and Weiss…"_ eyes blurring, she broke the chest of the canis atop her with a well-placed punch fueled with aura _, "…investment opportunity! The secrets of the families going back…"_ one down, two took its place biting at her. Why wouldn't the visions stop? Tene slew them both, his sword skewering both of them, he turned the other blade, _Augur's Bone_ , and the sole of his foot on another canis coming at them _, "…is it made of? What differentiates the semblance of some from the semblance of others? Why are some semblances passed along blood…"_ lines of blood running down her arm, from scabs opened and new cuts, one nearly permanently damaging her muscle, now congealing in a puddle on the cavern floor, Tene screaming for help, canis circling around them. Was help coming? Her eye sight faded. _This is bad. I should have never done this._

 _Cassandra calls._

"…these are basic questions about Aura that have been asked by generation after generation. But never before have had we had the technological capacity to answer them! In this age of scientific inquiry, it is our duty to discover the secrets of Aura, grimm and the world around us! But such subjects are pejorative because they are too closely entangled with fairy tales," the man was beginning to gesticulate wildly, losing composure, his face contorting into looks of contempt and awe, "To continue with this mindset is unprogressive. It goes against everything we stand for. It goes against curiosity." He stopped.

The man in the chair had raised his hand, bowing his head and cupping his forehead in the palm of his left hand, which was propped up by his elbow on the arm rest of his solid wood chair. "No no, Frois. The beginning of the speech is good. But your rhetoric begins to slip in the middle and the end. Investors are going to notice. You are blatantly _insulting_ them. Come back, same time tomorrow, with a much improved speech. In the meantime, feel free to visit with your cousin."

Frois bowed, "Yes Uncle Schnee." He stepped out, his cold, confident gate following him.

A door on the left opened, a beautiful woman with dark hair and light brown skin crept in. "He was not bad."

"Oh but he was. I asked him to write the speech as if he were presenting it to me. He deigned to insult _me_. The boy is an ideologue. He lets his emotions cloud his judgements. If this were not so he would not have blatantly insulted me, or written poor rhetoric." Mr. Schnee sat back in his chair and closed his eyes, hands tangled together, finger over finger, over his flat stomach.

Mrs Schnee sat in the chair directly in front of his desk. "Perhaps you should help him write it…"

"Nonsense. With his kind skills are used more powerfully when they are self-taught. It is better I do no work for him. If I were to walk into his chambers, which I have leased to him while he stays in our home, and tell him how to write _his_ speeches he will take this as insult on many different levels. Why did the military believe he was useful in pitching their plans to investors?"

"Because he is a Schnee?" Mrs. Schnee suggested. "Our 'humble' company has close ties to the military. Everyone knows this. If it is pitched by a Schnee then it automatically is more forceful."

"Mmmmhhmmmmmmmmmmm," the inner sigh gradually turned throatier, and not as loud until it faded into the corners of the room.

"But of course who knows what they were thinking?"

Mr. Schnee opened his eyes and sat fired, as if startled. "I _know_ what they were thinking. _Of course!_ How could I not see it sooner!? Oh good maidens…they were trying to get me to invest."

Mrs. Schnee knitted her eyebrows, "But you are already…"

"I am aware," he said gravely. He stood and began to pace about the room in a similar fashion as his nephew a few minutes earlier. "But he mentioned _Weiss and Winter_. He mentioned them in relation to _studies_. He mentioned the _family semblance_. At first I believed it was a personalization. The previous two days I thought he was taking it too personally," he embezzled this with a flourish of the hands. "They are trying to soften me to the idea of _my children_ being studied by their infernal research projects so that in the future when it was asked of me I'd approach the situation from a less obtuse angle."

Mrs. Schnee frowned at her husband's train of thought. "Are you sure? Our nephew has always been…"

"I am certain of it! The boy is intelligent! Dear Dustie would never raise his child without the capacity to assess itself tirelessly, analyzing and re-analyzing itself and its relation to the world through a seemingly arbitrary set of assumptions! That is why I was slightly perturbed by his seeming lack of progress in his presentations." He paced to the window and raised his eyes to the pine forest and mountains dressed in elegant white gowns from top to bottom and mulled over.

"When the time comes will you allow our daughters to be studied?" Mrs. Schnee inquired warily. A mother's ferocity was prepared to be unleashed if he answer wrongly.

Mr. Schnee, understanding a mother's ferocity outweighed curiosity in his own wife, turned and replied, "I defer to you on the matter."

Mrs. Schnee lifted her chin and replied, "No."

"Then that settles the matter. And if Frois presents the same old speech tomorrow I'll tell him the specifics of everything wrong with his speeches, while hinting at him that I know their game. It shouldn't be too hard. Shall we join them? It is our vacation away from the city."

Mrs. Schnee nodded and stood. Mr. Schnee walked up beside his wife and hooked arms with her, they began to exit the room. "I wonder what they're doing. You know how Frois is with children. He is too formal, I think," Mrs. Schnee regarded.

"What a strange set of contradictions our nephew is," Mr. Schnee observed.

"There are no contradictions within him, only within your vision of the way reality must be," Mrs. Schnee argued.

Lune and Tene

Fifty-six grimm. A pack of fifty-six grimm inhabited this cavern. Tene had killed seven. Lune had killed five. Her semblance was acting up. Her movements were sluggish, she was attacked more easily. She was bitten and was now bleeding on the floor of the cavern. She had passed out moments ago. There were now forty-four grimm in the cavern. They were encircling them.

There was water ahead. If only he could make it to the underwater river within this cave. He could gather the grimm around him and produce an electrical charge and channel it into the stream.

But such is life. She's a bitch. Their only hope was that help arrived from the outside, which was not likely.

"What do I do!?" Tene thought aloud. "Grimm all around," he began to flash back to his time in the ocean between Atlas and Vale. There were sea grimm in those icy cold waters. They had encircled his family in a way not unlike these canis were surrounding he and Lune. Flashback. His mother eaten. "No." Flashback. His father's leg lost. "NO." Flashback. He was helpless to do anything about it. "NO!" He leaped into the air, pushing himself further with his quanta. He touched the ceiling and entangled himself to it. The grimm had descended on Lune in that time. He slew them on descent and pulled the ceiling down. Dust fell from the ceiling. Cracks widened. Stalactites crumbled, columns fell. Pebbles landed on the heads of grimm who looked upwards at the collapsing ceiling.

And it was like a light in his chest was extinguished. His soul was laid bare to the world.

At that moment twelve grimm were crushed under the collapsed ceiling. Tene and Lune were lucky enough to be between rocks.

Off the rocks echoed the screams of dying grimm. Blood flowed between the cracks. Some crept into a depression in the rock leading right to Lune and Tene. They were bathed in blood.

Saun and Pan

Four people arrived on the scene of the cave collapse.

Saun and Pan were second to Ire, a red head with an inappropriate attitude and Eerie who seemed to keep Ire in check, but was still doing stupid things.

The howls of pain from the grimm inside were disappearing. They were already half as loud, meaning most of them had died.

Saun banged her head against the wall, "There are people inside. Two of them. Man and woman. One is unconscious. The other is terrified."

Eerie remarked, "It must have been bad if one of them had to collapse the ceiling to save them."

Ire, who was busy punching rocks with fiery fists and succeeding in cracking the rocks, said "Come on guys! Aren't you going to help?"

Saun stopped banging her head and screamed, "One of them is _LUNE!"_ She started to send pulses of sound into the rock. Ire began to make more headway with her help. Eerie shrugged and started to pull away boulders. Pan took after Eerie.

PSTL

Tene was terrified, to say the least. He had collapsed much more of the cavern than he had intended. His aura was practically gone. He wasn't sure how or why he was alive, all he knew was that he wanted to be in any situation than this, even dead.

 _Perhaps death is the answer._ His sobs grew worse. _There is no hope for help._ The howls of grimm filled his ears like the screams of the banshee decrying the death of loved ones on Atlasian tundras. "No, please no, not again." And he was again in the waters. Trembling in fear as he watched his family become blood in water. "No, no, no, no, no, no, nOO!" He cried. "None of it is real," he sobbed. "I am not there. I am here and now. I am here and now. Beacon. Vale. Huntsmen and huntresses. This is where I am. N-not there. Here." He felt his grounding in reality was shaky at best, but it would have to do. The grimm howls were fading. "Fading like the memories of bad times." He commented. _Cheesy_. He thought to himself. "What am I going to do?"

Lune's blood was spilling out onto the floor. Just like…nope. This was too much blood for just one person…nope. Not going there. I'm gonna need a new coat...NOPE! Not going there either. I am here and now, not anywhere else. This is water. Just water. He didn't expect her to awaken for quite a while.

 _Cassandra calls_. _The Seed must be laid._ Lune saw…Lune saw many things. Her reality had become an ocean of time. She recognized the ocean of fire, the Moon, whole and ablaze in the sky. A smile looking up at it, broken. Old man, smiling on four women. A city with white terraces and black circuitry, people in glass beds in glass cells with glass eyes. And the grimm, emerging from the dark. Red eyed. Red dust. People chanting. People drumming. People smiling. Hands waving, singing, dancing, clawing, screaming. The calls of the wounded, the explosions of fire on the battlefield. Battles over battle over battle, interfering with each so that in one a man kills with a sword and the other with a blast of energy, and another wears armor, and in another the man becomes machine. And finally, there was Ozpin, with a girl with mouse brown hair and an aura reminding her of something, something from the past, and yet what past? And then there was the image of her cousin, Saun, kissing a man, there was a lightning bolt in his left hand and his right was wrapped around her waist. The man stabbed her with the lightning bolt and blood spilled like a dagger. In the moment, Saun's face became Lune's and Lune's became Saun's. Two graves and then one grave, and then two graves again. And with that the stormy seas eased themselves and she knew that time would no longer pass, she had entered bounds beyond time, where there was only the company of the dirt and the worms.

Peace. And quiet. The seas were easy from here on out. She had found a place where the turbulence was negligible and she could rest her weary eyes. Under a pile of rocks. Covered in the blood of Grimm. Just resting was nice. _Peace at last._ She knew what was necessary now. She had glimpses of it. Now it was time to rest.

Tene was lost in his memories. He had no idea what was happening. There was only the screams of the grimm and the darkness, the blood pooling around him and the sensation of a body on top of him.

Lune opened her eyes and turned towards Tene and spoke in augury, "Tene. Come back to me. Come back to reality. Come on. Return. Ignore the screams of the Grimm. It is not real. The ocean is past. Come on Tene."

And Tene began to realize the body beside him was Lune. That the smell of blood pervaded them and that blood was really uncomfortable in your underwear.

"The entangling between two people is a beautiful thing. Two souls embracing each other, as light as a bird, air through its wings. It's time to manifest, Tene Breux, forget the Styx about us. Remember the arms of loved ones about you, in Atlas. Before the briny oceans turned to salty blood before your soul. Look back, Tene Breux, look back see the world before that heavy toll. Before innocence. Before Beacon, or Signal. Before briny oceans and sea grimm. Remember the arms of loved ones holding you close. Remember the sensation of skin before the morose. The entangling of people is a beautiful thing. Two souls dancing, like two birds awing. I can see it, Tene. Cassandra calls."

"You've gone bat-shit crazy," The words almost stuck in Tene's throat. He was afraid of what was about to happen. He had a faint idea of what might happen very soon.

Lune smiled at the happiness of a secret kept, "I just have a vision. Of us entangling our souls. Our two powers will get us out of here."

Tene sighed. "You want us to entangle? Our own souls?"

Lune nodded. "I have plenty of aura, I use practically none. I am an untapped reservoir of power. I can see it now. Your aura is too small for your semblance. Your semblance is too strong for your body."

A tear fell down his cheek, he felt as if he was betraying something or someone, but he was not sure what. And then he wondered if he was betraying himself, or if it was betrayal and not fear of losinga part of himself, "What will happen to us?"

Lune shook her head. "Don't fear it. Embrace it."

Tene touched her arm and felt her aura. It was like looking at starlight. It was eldritchly sublime. He had always known it was the physical presence of the aura, because grimm lacked it, he told himself. But perhaps that was an excuse. Might not a soul recognize a soul? Might not his senses recognize he could bond with someone? It certainly recognized he could bond with everything he could see. Why not the souls of others?

He entangled with her soul.

They became something else.

And that something was named Vaidhokhas. It saw clearly several possible futures, and conjured a clear path through the caves. It knew there were people trying to clear away rubble. It knew that the grimm were dying all about them. It knew many things, Vaidhokhas. It was still entangled with the rock all around it. Why not use the rock to move rock? It entangled itself with the rock, crushed all the rock it was entangled to into sand and began to spin it faster and faster, pushing the rocks out of the way, and pulverizing it, then flattening it, letting it spill between rocks until it covered the cavern floor. The sand pushed the rocks, _upwards._ The rocks began to file into place, sand was placed between each rock and solidified into a sort of shell, or mortar holding the rocks together. Each rock was set in place, mortar set between them, and the ceiling of the cave was rebuilt with a new column constructed from rock.

And where the pile once was were Lune and Tene, still lying in a pool of blood, but holding hands. The ceiling turned bright red hot, and then cooled tremendously, setting the stones in place. Vaidhokhas, job finish, seed planted, day saved, split.

Tene's aura was replenished. He was smiling. Lune was happy. _It begins_. A tear fell down her cheek.

Saun ran and pulled them both up, but practically pulled Tene away and completely tackled Lune. The two tumbled down the way of the cave and Saun laughed, Lune was confused.

Tene was knocked to the floor. Pan, Ire and Eerie were at his side, brushing dust off him. They made their introductions.

Moments later Saun and Lune arrived, arm in arm and laughing.

 _She cares for someone_. Pan thought. _How sincere is she in her love? Perhaps I'm being too cynical. Psychopaths have found love, not that she is a psychopath._

"Shall we finish this game of Ozpin's?" Lune inquired. _That man will kill Saun,_ she tilted her head at Pan and tried to cast his lot. She found that his path was a strange one, passing and converging with many other strange paths, one of which was her cousin, but in some futures they ended up happy together, married years down the line even. In others nothing happened, but in some…he killed her. Sometimes for good reason, sometimes without reason.

The rest gave variations upon affirmation.

They walked the cave's route and made it to the room with the stream, the red dust and the table of artifacts.

"The soul room," Lune remarked. "This was where the rituals of the inhabitants of this land took place. The water is warmed," she dipped her hand in the water, it was very _hot,_ "by the dust." She strained her aura to cast a glance backwards in time thousands upon thousands of years. "The elders of the tribe would take Dust Ore, refine it in these waters, and weave it into the clothes of the warriors. Dust was mixed into paint and designs were drawn on the people's bodies. They took part in rituals worshipping the Gods of Aura and the Gods of Grimm. For it was believed that it was best to keep the Gods of Grimm happy to keep the Grimm from attacking. It relieved them, which saved them from many grimm attacks."

Ire inquired, "Is this necessary? How do you know?"

Saun interjected, "She's read up on the subject."

"I can see the future," Lune corrected.

Eerie and Pan squinted their eyes, as if they were family. But Eerie passed it off and Pan's face took on a blankness which told him he stored away the information.

"What'd you guys do?" Saun asked Tene. "You and Lune. She seemed pretty shaken up. You do too."

Tene shook his head, "My semblance has always been an issue for me. If I use it as my eyes, because, believe or not, I am _actually blind_ , it hardly uses any aura. But the fact that it uses aura has always been a problem. In a way, I guess I can turn the world into an extra pair of arms and legs, and augment my own arms and legs so that I am faster, strong and more dexterous. But I cannot do it often and have to limit my use of it because it uses my aura. In a way, your…sister?"

"Cousin."

"Your cousin and I…I, well, I like to call it _entanglement._ If I entangle myself to an object I can control it, feel it, and do what I please to it. So what your cousin and I did was, well, and don't be alarmed by this, but I entangled myself to her soul. I said don't be alarmed! I could not control her soul any more than I can control mine. What happened was our souls kind of… _merged_ , like two liquids and then we separated out. It was like having two brains doing the work of one. I don't have full memory of what took place and neither does she. And I think that's because the memory of our becoming one was stored in _both_ of our brains. So I think if we entangled again we would be able to remember it, but since we are no longer entangled we possess half the memory."

Saun nodded. She opened her mouth as if to say something then closed it. She sighed. Then turned to look Tene in the eyes, she found this mildly disturbing because his eyes were vestigial and he did not look back, so she looked at his mouth instead, "How did you become blind?"

"I was hit by a car at the age of twelve. It was cold and snowy, the roads weren't very good. In that time they were testing new substances to 'salt' the roads with. It was kind of weird. The car hit me and I went flying several feet. There was a snow salter laying down the goods on the road and I landed head facing upwards directly underneath one of the trucks and got an eye full. I was blind almost instantly. The substance burned away my iris, my lens, my retina and part of my optic nerve. They were able to active reconstruction within the eye but the retina didn't heal properly and the optic nerves in both eyes were non-functional. My eyes look normal. They just don't have retina or nerves."

Eerie and Pan picked up the various artifacts on the table. "Are these…necklace beads?" Pan inquire

"With white, green, orange and purple beads," Eerie noted. "It's hard to tell in this light but I can see it." Pan agreed.

"Lune, whadaya see?" Tene asked. He had noticed her eyes looked far sighted, as if she was seeing something.

Lune pinched herself and looked at Tene, "It was nothing." She smiled. It was a fake smile. So terribly fake.

"That pinching _cannot_ be healthy." Tene turned to Saun after Lune turned to look at the beads.

"I _know_ , but it seems to be the only thing that brings her to."

"How did she make it into the school?"

"She is a skilled warrior. She was lucky that she didn't get lost during the tryouts." Saun looked at Lune and Tene admired the way she looked at her cousin. "She has always been a bit of an oracle. Even acted like it sometimes. It was scary as a kid to hear your cousin sometimes spout prophecies left and right, or react to things that weren't happening yet."

"Maybe it's a chemical thing. Chemicals are released in the brain when we experience pain. Maybe all she needs is some medicine." _The old stories speak of oracles breathing in gasses. Those gasses, perhaps they either caused them to see the future or stabilized them when they got lost in the seas of time._

"But what if it has the opposite affect? Or what if she can't use her semblance anymore?"

"Because she is always here? Would that be so bad?" And then he nearly smacked his forehead. "Oh wait. She needs her semblance to fight."

"Yeah, dumbass. It's necessary."

Pan and Lune came over to them, each with beads around their necks. "More people are coming," Pan commented.

"They say there are two nevermore roaming over the air." Lune reported.

"Nevermore! Why's it always gotta be Nevermores?" Tene asked, quoting a movie.

Pan sighed, "Nevermores are easy."

"Oh really?" Saun smiled. "Perhaps you would like to demonstrate that?"

"I can control the weather. If you take away the lift under their wings they fall from the sky. It is a simple matter of slaying them then." Pan shrugged his shoulders.

"You've killed Nevermores before." Lune stated.

"Yes, I have."

"No doubt your village was in trouble." Tene commented cynically. _I've killed one ursa. I'm not jealous._

"Alright, eye balls. Let us see _you_ try to kill a Nevermore all by yourself." Pan challenged. He lifted his chin high and crossed his arms. There was something failing about his posture which belied the opposite of regal.

"Or do you need the help of a woman to take down a single ursa?" Lune posited.

"I killed both those ursa and you know it."

"Only because of your semblance," she teased.

"They were viable techniques!" Tene argued.

"I'm just teasing, jeez."  
By now the room was bustling with people. There was easily thirty people.

"I am gonna kill a Nevermore," Tene smiled. "If you guys want to watch, feel free." He stuck his cane out and swung it from side to side, like a waterman searchin for water with water sticks.

"Why do you need a walking cane?" Pan asked. "Is it for purposes of deception? Because you are not deceiving anyone." Lune and Saun hung back for a second but decided to follow the two men.

"Perhaps not at Beacon, but in the real world no one suspects the blind man can fight."

"No one suspects the blind man can rob stores, either." Pan commented.

"It is a useful semblance for thievery. I used to steal donuts from a baker. The guy never suspected me because I walked through his walls, into his kitchen and through tables and shit to take a donut."

"Yeah, when we were bored and didn't feel like checking in with the local huntsman Saun would sit on the highest house in town and blast people's windows apart. At first people thought it was ghosts or something, or a difference in atmospheric pressure—"

"—idiots—" Saun smiled.

"—but after a while they figured it out. Nearly killed her, too."

"They made me pay for the windows. Can you imagine an entire village forcing me to take a job _on top of_ working on a farm? I became a waitress at the local tavern," Saun stuck out her tongue. "I was a hit among the old men. You should have heard some of the comments Gill had."

"Gill was our teacher."

"Huge pervert."  
"My dad trusted him though," Lune cocked her head nostalgically.

"My mom was always asking me if he touched me and you when she wasn't around to watch. I think she knew him when he was younger and more…action oriented."

"You mean when he would do the do, walk the walk, fuck the fuck?" Pan smiled at his glorious sophistication.

Saun looked at him disgusted, " _Yes_. Haven't you ever heard of a filter?"

"Baby, I have plenty o' filtration in bed. A nice condom does the trick jus' fiiine."

Saun and Lune took a step away from Pan, I was surprised to find my feet followed them.

"That is enough out of you," I clapped him on the back. "We only just met."

"We are going to Beacon for four years." Lune crossed her arms.

"So are you defending his talk the talk?" Saun asked.

"Well, he is just being proactive, even if he is being a bit of an asshat."

"Hmm, I guess I am. Sorry, unlike most people, when I'm nervous my filter is god awful." Pan scratched the back of his head. "Is there something I can do—"

"Just shut up," Saun demanded.

"We're coming up to the entrance. Who is ready to see me take down two Nevermore?"

"How do we know someone hasn't already killed them?" Saun asked.

"I don't think they have. I think they're fighting them," Lune asked.

"Do you see that in your visions?" Tene asked.

"No, but I can see that there aren't any more people walking in the opposite direction, and there were certainly more than thirty people, at least sixty in this year's class."

"Hm," Pan nodded.

"Wh _at_?" Saun asked.

"Nothing." Pan replied. "Just thinking."

Tene felt the cave open up into the world the clearing. He heard the birds overhead, the clash of claw on steel, beak on hammer. The bird were forward, to the left, a kilometer away. One student was riding one, two were in its claws, and one was holding on for dear life to the other's head which was trying to actively shake him off. But all Tene could hear was the flap of the wings. He could not see anything that was happening.

"What is wrong?" Pan asked. "Cannot see?"

"No, I cannot," Tene frowned. "I know they are a kilometer away, that there are two of them and that they are roughly over there. Buuuut…" _I don't know if have enough aura._

"I think he needs help," Lune looked to Pan. "Weather man?"

"Fine. But you own me a fraction of the victory." Pan took a back stance and lowered the palm of his hand which was open and facing up.

"Wait, what are you doing?" Tene felt the air around him begin to spiral around. "Oh no, wait—"

"Three, one and an half, zero, KAWHOOOSH!" Pan shot Tene high into the air in the direction of the birds.

Tene was first screaming, then he got ahold of himself, untwisted his swords, the White and the Black, he called them, and used his semblance to accelerate himself forward, through the air. Within another second he could feel the first bird enter his range of vision. He oriented himself and accelerated himself towards the head. It saw him and reacted, opening its beak to him. He _entered_ the mouth, curving Dark upwards, White downwards, splitting the roof of the mouth clean into the nasal cavity and splitting the tongue in half. He stopped abruptly, oriented feet first down the throat and hanging by his swords embedded in the bird's head. He pulled himself and Dark out of the nasal cavity and he fell down the throat of the bird right as the screech of pain began to emerge from its throat. He entangled himself to the throat and shut it up. Then he felt his stomach lurch upwards into his chest. The beak was beginning to close, he accelerated himself straight out of the beak and into the air, the first Nevermore was falling from the sky and already he was covered in Grimm Blood.

The second Nevermore was on the fringe of his vision and had succeeded in ridding itself of the student riding on its head. He accelerated himself upwards. It looked at him and shrieked. He smiled and pointed White at its wing, fired it, it swung around and around, end over end, to the left. It took an abrupt turn at the back of the wing and cut off the flying feather. He embedded White into the side of the bird and then accelerated himself onto the back of the back, around the neck. He did not expect the feathers to be covered in barbs and spikes, but he strengthened his aura around his hands and reached beneath the feathers, entangling himself to the bird and his phased his hand and slid it through its skin and kept it there. He then took Dark and plunged it straight into the spine of the bird. The bird was then unable to move and it fell from the air.

At the last second he leaped off and accelerated upwards to counteract gravity and he landed with a roll. The second Nevermore landed on top of several trees and crushed them, sending up an explosion of branches, leaves and other things. He plunged his swords into the ground and supported himself. Even with the power boost from Lune the battled had taken a tremendous toll on his body. His left leg gave out, the edge of his field grew blurry, he pulled himself up with both hands on the hilt of White and then his right leg gave out and he fell on face unconscious.

Pan was the first to arrive to his body. "Oh come on buddy, you should not have accepted the challenge if this was what it was going to do to you." He checked his pulse. It was heavy and fast. Tene was sweating violently. Blood covered his body, head to toe, but it was beginning to turn to black mist like the bodies of the massive Nevermores he had just slain.

Saun and Lune arrived a second later from the forest. Next by a small crowd of people.

Pan smacked his face a few times and Tene opened his eyes, mumbled something about killing one ursa for his village, and then went back to sleep. "Well, I guess we will just have to carry you." Saun took on arm and put it around her shoulder, Pan took the other and they lifted and dragged Tene towards the cliff where Ozpin had catapulted them.

"There is another Nevermre ahead."

"Should be simple," Pan and Saun said simultaneously. "We just have to make it out of here, right? With these beads?"

"Yes," Lune nodded.

Pan grunted affirmation and they trudged through the forest.

"You shot him forwards, can't you do that with us?" Saun asked.

"I won't be able to control all of you, besides, I am doing something right now." Pan smiled gleefully.

Saun wondered what it was he had planned. And then she looked up and noticed stratocumulus clouds erupting into existence, growing very quickly. "You're making a storm…"

Pan chuckled a little.

"So much power. How do you contain it all?" Saun wondered.

"He has a lot, but not enough to do this alone," Lune commented. "He either augments his ability with Dust or he has a grasp of the Butterfly Effect. He changes small things in an area and understands that these small changes will cascade into larger and larger changes."

"That is impressive."

Pan was silent on the matter. His face showed super concentration on changing the weather from sunny, hot and humid to raging storm.

A massive black bird with a wing span of fifty feet swooped down into the forest and landed. It flapped its wings, flattening any trees directly underneath. The stratocumulus grew and grew. Pan screamed and lightning arced between two clouds, one in the east, the other in the west. The Nevermore flapped its wings and screeched. It was maybe a football field away from them. Pan let go of Tene and started to run.

"Saun, cover him." Lune looked at the herd of griffins coming down from the stormy sky. "I got Tene."

Saun prepared her gauntlets and ran into the forest after the herd of griffins.

Lightning arced between the clouds and down to the Nevermore. He took out his dual sickle pistols and fired into the eyes of the Nevermore. The bird arched its head, extending his neck upwards and outwards. It struck the head of the Nevermore. Pan hit a cushion of air above the ground and skated around the Nevermore, firing his sickle pistols at the claws on the wings and the feet, destroying them. And then he leaped ran up the back of the bird and planted one scythe on the back of the neck. The bird flapped its wings, the spikes on the feathers had burned clean off and Pan wrinkled his nose at the smell. The Nevermore leaped into the air, flapping with some difficulty. Pan smiled and created a strong downdraft and pushed the Nevermore downwards on the ground. Lightning arced across the sky and Pan leaped off the Nevermore before it struck the Nevermore, clearing it by several feet. He hovered in the air, watching the thing fall to the ground with a THUMP. Its wings quivered, the feet twitched. The Nevermore began to evaporate.

When Pan had struck the Nevermore with lightning the first time, Saun had entered the fray with the griffins. She fire her gauntlets, exploding some fire in their faces, covering some of their wings with ice and then she began to sing the song of death, mainly long, high pitched vowels, eerily beautiful and creepy. The griffin's reaction times slowed down and she fired from her gauntlets, blasts of sound. Exploding their hearts, their central nervous systems, melting away bone and muscle, blood and vessel. Eyes exploding. Brains ceasing to function. Swipe, turn, blast, turn, blast, dodge, turn, blast, punch, blast, hold back with a wall of sound, blast it. _And keep singing. Don't stop singing. Sing for my life._ She kicked one in the face, blasted another, exploding its head backwards as if caught in a wind, chunks of skull and blood and brain and beak shooting backwards, disappearing in the black mist of grimm. One more. She turned her fists to the last one, it reared its front legs like a horse. She punched the air with a blast of sound and exploded its heart. She saw its chest convulse, the ribs cracking, the legs kicking in the air and then going limp. She leaped backwards from the corpse and fell onto her ass over a bush.

The scene was shrouded in black mist, and when it cleared there were no bodies. But there were branches and leaves and holes in the ground and piles of snow and burned grass. As if there was a battle here, but the bodies had long since been removed.

Pan floated downwards, releasing the cushion of air he stood on and fell the last foot to the ground. "Damn. Some party."  
"Yeah, some party." Saun smiled.

"We should go back," Pan turned away without flourish and walked non-chalant away from the scene of battle.

Saun looked one last time at the wreckage in the forest she had wrought and then turned away, following in Pan's footsteps.

Mist rose over the forest, rising high into the sky. The big bodies decayed slower than the small ones. But even they were disappearing, the only trace of them were new clearings in the forest, fallen tree trunks and burned grass. Areas which might bewilder future students in future years. The wind blew over the forest, caressing the trees, lifting their scent into the air, carrying it over to more trees, in other forests, carrying it far, far away to other places. A little cloud flew by overhead and the sun was past noon. Elsewhere in the forest little black stacks of mist rose and then dissipated into nothingness. And after a time the students wandered back to the cliff and made their way back to the school. And new grimm entered the forest, and new grimm traversed the paths of the old grimm. The sun set and the moon rose, the light passing through the thin clouds which now covered the forest. The wind was not as strong, but it still carried with it the scent of the trees to places far, far away.

End of One


	2. Intermission

Intermission

If Only to Move the Stars in the Sky to the Right Bearing…

 _October 2_

 _The highlight of today's day was when Lune and I entangled. In recent weeks we have been trying to replicate what happened the first time we entangled. And I have to agree that it seems each time we do entangle it is a little different than the one before._

 _But…we can barely remember what happened while we are entangled, all we receive is a general emotional state and vague bits and pieces of memory and half-memory from when we entangle. We were angry, we were sad, we moved an arm here, we got lost in time etc._

 _But today it was a little different. Today we entangled and for a few seconds our personalities did not meld, but our souls merged and entered something which can only be termed a strange dance. For a few seconds we were both conscious, we were both conscious of each other and we were conscious that the energy of our souls were merging, were swirling and smashing and brushing together, holding hands and twisting legs, they were streaming around one after another, sometimes chasing, sometimes dancing. And it seemed I could see into the past, present and future, and in this vision I had the clearest sight, because instead of images we received lay outs of events, three dimensional and whole. And it seemed, if for only the merest of a second, that reality was overlaid, manifold possibilities…merging like our two soul's dancing._

 _I do not quite understand what these songs of time are, or what they represent. What we saw were the inhabitants of this land long ago. And then dark things moving across mountains. And then a great dragon with grimm following in its wake. We saw the school and a bright flash of light and suddenly we saw a place…a place with a woman…a woman over a cliff. And then we saw a place, in a laboratory somewhere, where grew the first consciousness from silicon, a little aura emanating from a little piece of flesh, but it was not flesh, it was circuitry suspended in a bath._

 _And afterwards, right as we lost consciousness, I felt that I could manipulate Lune's own soul. I felt it had a tangibility, a kind of malleability, amorphous and changeable, pungent and sweet smelling, it sounded like bells and wind and snow falling of fields. I felt I could impose my will over this thing which I had never before been able to impose will upon before. I felt, that we were not truly merging into one being, but into two symbiotes, one soul feeding the other, one soul handing the other information, and one soul, theoretically, could will itself over the other and steal._

 _That is what I do with aura, after all, but that is slightly different. When I steal aura I only change the energy of the soul. After a time the soul can no longer bear itself outwards and it recedes into a person. I merely steal the energy with which it is capable of doing this. It is more vampirism than what I speak of. What I am saying is that I think, if I willed it, I could change a soul, like conducting surgery on a body, like taking a man's internal organs out, like removing an arm and a leg, like changing a stone into an arrow head, I can change a soul into whatever I wish it to be. And I feel that if only I understood what to do, if I were not just blindly messing with something I barely understood, I could reach into Lune and reshape her soul, change it forever._

 _And when I sensed a hunger to do this, to actually reach into her and change her, change her semblance, change her mind forever, I was frightened, but before I could do anything I lost myself in the merge and we were two symbiotes._

 _It was so strange. Never have I felt the need to impose my will upon anyone, to actually change a person. Never have I considered using my semblance to change a soul, never have I actually considered my semblance could be used for anything more than theft of another's aura. But then, when it first was considered, I hungered after it. I thirsted for it. A wanted to do something I had never even considered to do before._

 _Is it possible, then, for me to change a soul? To play with it like Saun plays with animals? To manipulate the soul like Pan can the weather? Can I manipulate my own soul, like my body?_

 _Yes._

 _Because I have already done it. I manipulated my soul to give myself vision where I had none. I reached out, in my moments of fear, and I felt for the world, I needed to be bound in reality. My vision was disappearing into swirling darkness, my eyes were burning and I was so afraid that I was losing my sight. That I would never become a huntsman. And then, like a miracle, the first superstrings sang their voices in the vision centers of my brain, as if something had tweaked my brain just for that purpose, and I could sense all the world, the titillating screams of the atoms, the haunting howls of the snow falling through the air, the rush, as of blood, of air currents moving in and out, across buildings and into the sky, I felt the whistling and whisking of people moving around and the chittering of car engines and wheels on road. I felt it all in my head. And it was like a miracle. I could see again. A different sight, one I had never possessed or had known myself or anyone in my family to possess before. It was not like the family semblance. It was something new._

 _All this time, I thought my semblance was quanta. And it quanta, but what if it is more than that? What if this sixth sense I possess was not just the first stage in learning how to use my semblance, but the first stage in learning to manipulating souls? I don't know. Writing it down it does not make as much sense as it does in my head. Obviously, what this means, what it has always meant, is that souls are something real and physical, something I am able to entangle with, and perhaps something I can manipulate, if only I were to impose my will upon it._

 _And right now, as I sit in my bed, I am turning my attention inwards, and I am focusing my attention on myself. And I feel my own soul. I have to sense carefully, it changes and pieces of it seem to be influenced by the air currents. But I sense it as a thing that is just above my head, that touches the crown of my head and extends downwards, a tendril of it down my spine, down my arms, but mostly it concentrates on my brain._

 _I can feel that it has pieces, like a body has pieces, cells and organs just like human bodies._

 _And now I am reaching for it, with my own semblance, and I can feel it, a tangible thing, amorphous and pungent, sweet and solid, tangible just like Lune's._

 _A star above my head._

 _I brush its skin and I can feel something about it reverberating through my entire body, a convulsion in my own brain. Something primal, it is screaming to me, alerting me that I am doing something that I have not done for a very long time. Because now I see, that it looks like my soul is small, it is weak and damaged in some strange way. As if it is squeezed and I see that part of it looks to be shoved inside my head, unpleasantly._

 _What if I were to unfold it? Would I lose my semblance? Would it change who I am? What I have become? Would I be no longer able to see?_

 _I do not know. It is tempting to play with, but I do not know yet what it could do. And so I am leaving it alone for now._

 _Tomorrow we are fighting two v. two in Goodwitch's class. I think we're working on unfamiliar teams._

 _I also hear Ozpin is planning to announce something to the school. Something involving Vytal maybe? I don't know. It is not on the schedule._

 _But it is being held here, at Beacon. It alternates, after all, moving between schools on a four year cycle._

 _Sixty-eight years. Isn't that funny? Since the world was changed forever. I think it has really gone a long way._


	3. Chapter 2

Nighttime at Beacon

Lune wanted nothing more than dreamless sleep.

She never asked for her power. She wanted an eternity without time to sort herself out and see the present, and only the present. And she wanted it badly at that very moment.

She leaned over the side of her bed and in the moonlight watched Tene sleep in the bunk beneath hers. She did not think of his past or his future. His now was the most important thing to her. He was splayed out look a star fish. His chest rose and fell in even increments. She smiled at him, wondering if he dreamed of her and hoped they were good dreams.

"You're awake?" Pan asked, calling across the room.

Lune jerked her head into the corner of darkness his voice emerged from. "Yeah." She could only see the foot of his bed and the rise of his feet under the covers there.

"Do you think we're going to make it?"

Lune sighed. "We're here now, not then."

"Sorry," apologetically. "I know that's touchy. What do you think they dream about?"  
Lune sat upright and crossed her legs, indian style. "He dreams of us, in a cave, where the inhabitants of a tribe of peoples in Vale drew away their anger and sadness. And she dreams of a field of daisies outside our home. She dreams they smell of the sea. She's always loved the sea."  
"You sound like you hate the sea."

"I do. It's briny and the waves disturb me."  
"Hm," was all Pan said.

Crickets chirped outside.

"What happened in that cave, anyways?"

"We became one. And something new was born."

"Do you think others can become one with him?" Pan asked.

"I really doubt it."

"How do you know?"

Lune cocked her head. She did not know how she knew. "I, don't know. I just know."

"Maybe someone is in love."  
"Maybe someone can be punched in the face."  
"Maybe someone needs sleep." Pan fired back.

"GRR!" Lune turned over and closed her eyes tight. _Don't think. Don't think at all. Think and you'll be lost again._

"How do you suppose the moon broke?"

"The Moon was a bitch who wouldn't shut up. The stars hated her because she wouldn't shut up. So one night they all told her to shut up. And she refused. So they silenced her with a thousand kicks and screams. Her face was bloody with silver ichor, and those are her splotches. And her face is in pieces because of all the kicks they gave her. The Moon was silent from then on. Good night, Pan."

Pan was silent. "But then the stars spent a long time without hearing her voice. And the stars missed it very much. So they decided sing and shine their light in a single place. That place became a new star brighter and louder than anything. That star became the sun. And her music was so loud the stars left her alone in the sky and migrated to the night."

Lune smiled. She thought it was a pretty story. "And one day a star stayed with the sun and left the night. But the star was blown out of the sky and fell to Remnant. Here she discovered the beauty of this world. She walked and found many palaces and old villages. Clearly there had been stars here once, but where had they gone?"

Pan smacked his lips, deep in thought. "Only the remnants of a bygone world remained. And so the star named it Remnant. One day she came across a grimm. The grimm and the star fought and the star lost."

"And the blood of the star soaked the world and made rivers that fell into the ocean. The body was good to grow with, and the rocks decided that there they would grow into mountains. And so they did. And her blood became their blood, which now courses and gives life to the land. And the land was named Vale. After a time the ruins disappeared completely and a tribe of people came to this place where it was safe. In time they grew and destroyed the grimm between the Starry Mountains and the sea. This place was named Vale for it was the Vale of the Stars. Your turn."  
"Uhm. And the Vale grew mighty and in time many things happened. The people were happy and were able to relax. They built farms and families in Vale and eventually cities and mines. Vale was a happy place and a beacon of hope to all under the stars. That is why the school is named Beacon."

"It was the star's hope that Beacon would be bright enough for the stars to see her and know she had not died without becoming something. But Beacon was not bright enough. So a wizard came and cast a spell and on Beacon grew a school where the hope of humanity might grow. Go on Pan."

Pan was quiet enough to be asleep.

"Pan?"

Lune guessed he had fallen asleep. So she closed her eyes and dreamt of the stars, caves, mountains and Tene. She dreamt of being one with a better half and she was happy in that dream. She wished it would go on forever.


	4. Chapter 3

The Yellow Brick Road

Saun and Amber watched the battle unfold, arms crossed. In the middle of the Beacon courtyard Pan, Tene and Mars circled each other, Tene closer to Pan.

Mars was a buff man with dark brown eyes, skin pale as clouds and wolf ears protruding from the top of his head. "Take back what you said!"

"She isn't interested in nature's garbage, faunus!" Pan yelled.

"Two against one isn't a fair fight!"  
"Neither are your claws, your nose, your ears, your strength, your balance, none of it is fair either! A fucking freak, too perfect to be true. But it's the heart of a faunus that is marked. That's what they taught me back home," a winter wind blew through the courtyard from the seas to the north. A cloud bank appeared on the east sky. Leaves rattled against each other and the crowd gasped as Tene took the first move.

It was elegant and quick. His swords, Albu and Abun, were flying one at Mars and the other at Pan. Mars dodged Albu but Pan was knocked on the head with the pommel of Abun. Mars raised his gauntlets and released their hidden blades. He was fast, but Tene was faster.

Mars aimed for Tene's kidneys but Tene was in the air, drop kicking Mars' head and sending him flying into the crowd which parted.

"Stay away from each other, assholes!" Tene screamed at them, his voice resonating not only from him but his swords which floated mysteriously and from the ground he had been standing on. "If either of you make a move at me or each other I'll swat you like flies!"

Amber turned to leave but Saun held her back with a firm hand on her shoulder. "You should help me help one of them."

Amber pinched the bridge of her nose and walked to Mars. She helped him up and Mars pushed her away. "Stay back, wench."

"STUDENTS!" Professor Goodwitch's voice carried clear as a bell across the yard. Everyone looked at her. "Tene, Mars, Pan, Saun and Amber with me! Tene, drop those swords from the air or I'll wrest them from your control."

From Tene's perspective he saw a dim quantum field around Goodwitch and from this field emerged several tentacles. He dropped the swords. Across his field, directly behind him someone began to throw a knife at his back and another at Pan's head.

What happened next happened all too quickly. Lune, who had been in the dorm was there, pulling Pan away from the knife's path. Tene pushed himself away from where he had been and then ordered his trench coat to unravel into a rope at the sleeve. Fabric tore and spun across the courtyard and narrowly missed pulling out a leg.

Next Tene knew he was at the top of Beacon Tower, beneath the clockwork. Eight people were present. Amber, Saun, Ozpin, Glynda, Pan, Mars, Midnight, the knife chucking assailant, and Lune. Tene was lying on the floor while everyone sat around Ozpin's peculiar desk.

"Nice of you to join us Mr. Tene Breuxe," Ozpin motioned for a chair.

Everyone's face reacted with surprise. Only Ozpin had noticed Tene was awake, and that within seconds.

"How long have you been awake?" Pan said.

"He just woke up," Lune replied, her eyes on Ozpin. Ozpin did not acknowledge her stare. Lune had a face of knowing, she bit her lips whenever she was distressed and her eyes followed Ozpin's every move with poorly hidden suspicion.

"Miss Lune, speak to your headmaster with respect." Glynda chided.

Tene sat where Ozpin motioned. It was a shoddy pull open deck chair dredged from a closet beside the ground elevator door.

"We have much to discuss," he stood and motioned for Glynda to 'take the stand'. He picked up his coffee mug and traded places with Glynda to the right side of the group. Glynda, confident in her role, stood in front of the desk and sat with a simple grace. Her dim tentacles slithered over the room and ventured unnervingly close to Tene's hands.

 _Can I touch it?_ Tene reached out and tried to grab the tentacle but his hand passed through it. He tried to touch it again, this time with some willpower, and it still phased through. _Huh._

"I think all of you know why you are here. Shame be to you all. If it were up to me I'd immediately evict you from school premises and order tickets for you on the next air ships home. But Professor Ozpin has advised that I should listen to your stories before I consider expelling all six of you. I'll begin with Saun. And don't modulate your voice or anyone else's. We'll know."

Tene scanned the faces of everyone. Lune's eyes followed a path between Glynda, Saun, Mars, Amber and Ozpin, stealing a lot of time on Ozpin.

Saun began, "It all started the third day at Beacon. We were in Professor Oobleck's class when Pan and Mars butted heads. At first we took it for competition. And then the competition began to involve a young woman, our Amber." She motioned to the lightly-dark skinned girl with brown hair and brown eyes in her Beacon schoolgirl uniform. "Within the past two weeks the competition escalated from peculiar sessions interrupting Amber's studies in the library and culminating into a full on fight an hour ago."

"Why did it escalate into a fight?" Ozpin asked.

Saun addressed Ozpin, "Pan began to p-…" she could not help but to smile at the absurdity. "Pull his moves on Amber. Amber was not having it, so Mars came over and gave it his own try. Pan was frustrated and they confronted Amber on who she preferred. When Pan asked he mentioned Mars was…placating Amber like a dog might to a master."

"Those were not his words," Mars interrupted.

"Child! Shush!" Glynda smacked her cattle whip on the desk.

Her tentacles vibrated and Tene shivered. He noticed Ozpin took note of his shiver, and that Lune took note of Ozpin taking note. He smiled at the absurdity.

"It doesn't matter what his words were, the meaning was the same," Amber reminded Mars.

Tene scanned Midnight. The man was not paying any attention to the proceedings. _Asshole nearly killed me, the least he could do is listen_. Lune looked at Tene and Tene smiled to her. She smiled back. He motioned with his head at Midnight and Lune checked him out.

 _Not even listening._ She mouthed.

Tene shook his head and closed his dead eyes. He would wait this one out.

"The confrontation escalated and Pan said some particularly nasty things about wolf packs, dog breeds, incest and female dogs and Mars' mother. You can guess what he said. Mars was rightly insulted and he questioned Pan's manhood and virtue and challenged him to a fight. Tene challenged Mars to a duel and then patted Pan on the back. The lockers were called and a crowd began to form. Then Tene turned on both of them, quickly disarming Pan and humiliating Mars enough to buy some time. It was then that Midnight threw the knives at Pan and Tene. Lune was running across the school grounds. I wondered why, but she made right for Pan and pushed him out of the way. Then Tene destroyed his lovely jacket trying to catch Midnight and Glynda forced Tene down to the ground, but it was with too much force and she knocked him unconscious." Ozpin frowned towards Glynda. Tene noticed Glynda's heart rate increase and her blood vessels tightened. She blushed with anger and shame, Lune, Midnight and Amber noticed.

"Now, Amber. Did you lead the boys on in any way?" Ozpin asked, he walked behind his chair and placed his hand on the chair, over Glynda's right shoulder.

Tene felt Glynda's anxious response towards Ozpin.

Amber blushed, "Well."

"Damn right she did. Made a proper fool out of Mars," Midnight explained.

"And would you have thrown your knives at her, as well?" Glynda accused. Ozpin shook his head. "Glynda, may I please take my seat?"

"Of course," Glynda stood and took her place where she had stood.

Ozpin sat, took a sip of his coffee. "Coffee, anyone?"

No one raised a hand. Except Midnight who replied, "I'll take one, please, sir."  
"Now. Most of you are guilty of being children, which is to say you're not guilty. Everyone except Midnight leave the room, please. Pastel, could you please wait outside for our meeting with Midnight to be over?"

Pan nodded, "Yes sir, we can."

Ozpin's eyes briefly looked at Lune and he mouthed the words, _If you vision badly of here be sure to stop it._

Lune nodded and then he looked at Tene and motioned for him to leave as well. Tene raised an eye brow. "Is there any way I'll get my coat back, or at least get money to buy a replacement?" He smiled when he saw Glynda's face explode with partly hidden rage.

"We pay huntsmen and huntresses, Mr. Tene Breuxe. Not children." Ozpin spoke the words strangely, hinting something could be arranged. And then he looked at Lune indicating that if they did as they were asked they might be paid.

"Thank you, sir." Tene bowed low and left.

The six of them piled into the elevator. Pan had selected the floor beneath Ozpin's office while Mars had selected ground floor.

"What a freak Midnight is," Amber gossiped.

"I wouldn't have let him hurt you." Mars said.

"Oh shut up you desperate fuck!" Pan ordered with tremendous sass.

The door opened and Saun pulled Amber and Pan out of the elevator, leaving Mars alone.

"Wait, this isn't her stop." Mars said, the door closing.

"Like Pan said, shut up you desperate fuck," Lune sneered.

The doors closed on Mars.

The waiting room was like any other waiting room in any other office. It had a box of toys and crayons, a pile of paper, chairs around the edges. It had natural lighting from several long and thin slit windows and in specially crafted store cases various medals and photos were kept on display beneath the Beacon emblem.

"Thanks for saving me from that!" Amber beamed.

"No problems." Saun said.

"Ozpin was communicating with you two," said Pan. "He hired you for your first mission right then and there, did he not?"

Lune nodded. "He asked Tene and I to keep an eye on the room above."

Amber smiled, "You know, Tene. I would say you're afraid of Glynda Goodwitch."

Tene nodded agreement. "She is every bit the witch the name suggests. I can see ephemeral aural tentacles protruding from her head, slipping across the room and sitting beside us."

"Ewww, really?" Saun said.

Lune sat back and sighed, "Tene's smart to be scared of Goodwitch. If she had her way we'd be expelled."  
"What do you expect from a new teacher?" Amber wondered.

"She's new?" Pan said.

"Yeah, hired in the middle of last year. She replaced a retiring professor. But she and Ozpin have always been close."

"Did they go here at the same time?" Saun asked.

"No," Tene and Lune replied. "You go first," Tene motioned.

"Ozpin is really old," said Lune. "Sometimes my semblance is metaphorical but I got the message he was really old loud and clear."

"His name is a name from before the Great War."

"Midnight is fighting them," Tene said. His milky-white eyes twitched upwards involuntarily. He squinted his eyes like he was straining to hear. "Midnight is subdued."

Lune nodded off right then. And instantly Saun was by her side, holding her hand.

"What is happening?" Amber asked.

"Lune is suffering from a sort of narcolepsy."

Tene walked over to Lune, bent down and his eyes stared at her face. Something twitched in his eyes, but then they died again. He extended a hand to her free hand and instantly they were together in a sea of time.

"Are you seeing what I'm seeing?" Lune asked. They gazed at a branching string that was a person. At the end of the string was a singular ending and at the beginning of the string was a singular beginning.

"A person which begins and ends only once. A fate decided. Who is this?" Tene said. He searched for other strings attached and noticed many events and times. He touched each string with his mind and it revealed to him an image of the person, both symbolically and visibly. "This string, it can't be who I think it is."  
"Who is it, Tene? I can't see it." Tene looked over at Lune and noticed her eyes were milky white like his. "I can't see anything." Her chest rose and fell in rapid successions of breath. "I can't see anything at all, Tene!" And then the sea of time went dark, the strings fell away beneath their feet. They floated in nothingness.

Tene scrambled backwards from Lune's body, which began to convulse. She mumbled words in a language that flowed like water from a waterfall off her tongue. The syllables, words and tone indistinguishable from each other. There was a hint of familiarity to it in his ears, like he was half-remembering a language he used to be able to speak.

" _Effeluth, grimma bin-assfelx!"_ Tene cursed in Old Mantese, the language he had grown up with.

"What is she saying!?" said Amber.

Saun held up her finger and listened intently to Lune. Lune spoke for another dozen seconds before her eyes flickered open.

Tene had not yet recovered from the wall he had backed up against.

"I saw you, Tene. And then I saw with your eyes. Does it always hurt like that when you see?"

"I don't understand why it hurt you," Tene said, on a different conversation.

Pan crossed his arms, "I would like to know very much what her prophecy is."  
"Prophecy?" said Amber, crossing her arms and tapping her foot. "Where are you and Lune from, Saun? This sounds like fairy tale legend, like maidens, wizards, marauding gods and sacrifices."

Saun shot Amber a look. Tene could only understand that look as an explosion of angry pain she felt because Amber hit an emotional nerve. Amber clammed and sat on the floor, waiting, watching for what would happen next.

"The words are in Ninulen," Saun said. "But the translation is something like this.

 _Four men up on their horses_

 _Four men masquerading as what they are not._

 _Evil is afoot. Evil is nigh._

 _Fear these four, and fear their shadow._

 _Four men up on their horses._

 _Master seamstress behind them, spinning webs of lies._

 _Darkness is sown. Darkness has come athroned._

 _And in their hearts it has grown._

 _Four men up on their horses._

 _And Four Seasoned Houses dressed in regal manner._

 _In the four seasons, leaves aturn._

 _Soon winter will host, free for all then._

 _Four men up on their horses._

 _Conspiracy to keep them at safety's bay._

 _New life and new death breathed._

 _It will breath into her and die she wills._

"The translation is very rough. I'll come up with a better one soon enough." Saun replied.

"A prophecy? What were my exact words?" Lune asked.

Saun repeated them to her in Ninulen and Lune shook her head.

"Ozpin will see you now," the door to the elevator opened. She raised an eyebrow at the scene and then noticed Amber. "Amber will leave immediately."

"Yes, ma'am." Amber bowed and the four stood and entered the elevator.

"I'll know if you have not left."

Amber nodded. The elevator doors closed on her. A cool draft slipped into the room and made Pan shiver. Tene smiled at the irony.

Once they were comfortably situated in Ozpin's office Ozpin sat down and sipped his coffee. "You are wondering where Midnight is, no?" He waited. Pan and Saun nodded. "Well, Midnight left. I am surprised no one noticed."  
"There was a situation, sir." Tene said. "Lune needed comforted."  
"And I don't suppose this situation involved an oracular vision?"

Saun nodded her head earnestly. "She spoke a prophecy. Five verses, four lines in Ninulen. Do you speak it, headmaster?"  
Ozpin shook his head. "Old Ninulen was too old even for me. Besides, it is a nearly dead language. Once the Lingua Franca centuries ago, but now only exists in isolated communities. Please, give us the translation, Saun."

Saun did, this time changing a few words, but the meaning was the same over-all.

"Well. What I am about to tell you I tell you in order so that you are safe. If I did not tell you you would figure it out yourselves. You four possess special semblances. But by far Lune's is the most prominent and most desirable to—certain parties like the one Midnight belonged to. The ability to see the future, past and present is so very rare that it is believed to be myth by the majority of people. Oracles are things of legend. And yet here we have Lune, spouting five verse, four lines each, prophecies about seasons, men and death. Ominous portent hangs over four people right now. Or perhaps multiple groups of four people.

"What I am about to tell you must not be mentioned in public and I must warn against mentioning it to each other in private. Just as Lune is thought to be fairy tale to most of the world, so too is everything an oracle entails: magic, monsters, heroes, villains and, perhaps, even gods after a sort. Magic comes in many shape and forms. It may appear as mantles of power, or offices a person might hold. It may appear as an especial ability to control aura. And sometimes it springs from us when we do not try. Sometimes children are born with specific abilities, such as Lune. The augury are among the ranks of the silver eyes and placids. And it is marked by dreams and visions during which the sorcerer may spout prophecies.

"Does Lune keep a book of prophecy?"

"Yes, sir," Lune said.

"I advise you either burn it or hand it over to Glynda to be kept in the care of the school. A book of prophecy is as good as the oracle who wrote it. And we can't let anyone like Salem get ahold of it. Salem is a witch who grows and controls grimm. Her palace is far to the north on the north end of the continent above ours. Her Grimm, as you know, ravage humanity. It is her wish that we die. Imagine what she might do with Lune or a book of prophecy.

"Of course, there are others. The White Fang. Tai Magal. The Alu Manaty. But these are nothing compared to Salem. Midnight was one of Salem's agents. He managed to infiltrate the school easily. I know what you are thinking. You wonder if you will have to leave Beacon, but you do not. Beacon is the safest place in Vale. Not only are there a thousand huntsmen and huntresses in training, but there are experienced teachers, huntsmen always visiting and the rest of the kingdom between you, grimm and infiltrators. You are safest in Beacon.

"That said, you cannot leave Beacon until the end of your first year. Especially Lune cannot leave Beacon, doubly so if she is alone. The path the four of you have entered is a perilous one. The destinies you have chosen are not for the sick of heart, or ill of mind. You must be courageous, intuitive, strong and unified against the enemy, and never forget the good of the world in your fight.

"Now forgive me, everything was unexpected. You will return here tomorrow morning where you may ask any question and I will answer to the best of my responsibility. The four of you are allowed to leave."

"Yes headmaster," Pan said.

The four of them trotted down the steps of Main Tower.

"I can lock the book away. We don't need to burn it or hand it over. I can lock it with a quantum lock." Tene offered.

"How does that work?" Pan asked.

"The lock only opens when certain quantum fields interact with it. It's a simple matter. I create a space in a wall, or some other object, I close that space, change the characteristics into a subatomic code to inform the wall to do A when B happens. B can be an object with the solution to the code. The particles of that object are Imbued with the code, so people aren't very good because by their next meal and sojourn to the bathroom it's possible an essential part of the code is gone from them. I would suggest something we keep with us all the time."

"Like the weapons," Saun suggested. "How complex can you make this code?"

Tene shrugged. "It takes a while for me to do any Imbuing but I'm sure I can make it pretty complex with enough time."

Lune shook her head. "Where would we keep the Book?"

"The dorm," Pan suggested.

"Inside a tree," Saun recommended.

"In a place we can all access. Ideally, the four of us should be able to access it, right?" Tene asked Lune. "It's your book. You decide where."

"I haven't decided if we should Imbue any spot to keep the Book."

"It's the safest option, Lune. Only we know where it is and only we can open it," stated Saun.

"But can Tene open it without the solution?"

"You know the answer to that already," suggested Tene.

"Tene, we're going to lock away the book. But we have to merge when you do it."

"Why?"

"So that only I know where it is, and only Saun can guess. We'll Imbue all the weapons except for Tene's with the solution."

Pan was dumbstruck. "But if you merge will not Tene know where it is too? Unless if both your brains are used as a single brain and…oh. In that case you can use your semblance to…I see. And since Saun knows you so well. Hm. Okay. I understand why you are doing this, Lune. I support it fully."

"Good. Then we'll do it tonight."

The four of them walked up the steps, shoulder to shoulder, and entered the door into the dorms in a line.

The edge of the blue sky was beginning to darken and lighten in response to the setting sun. A cool breeze blew up from the sea and across the campus. A few people sniffed the salt and wondered why the sea enticed them. Why some of them wanted to jump into it, wade in it and take a mouthful of the briny water and spit it out. These thoughts did not last very long and the people turned to their problems; however, the sea sat still and the shallow waters around Vale did not betray its human inhabitants as it had for generations unreckoned. The sea enticed them because it was pleasurable, and it was only pleasurable because the shallow waters helped to keep grimm at bay.


End file.
